Cover image courtesy of Adams & Chittenden

I don’t know if it started with “Young Frankenstein” or “Back to the Future,” but somewhere along the line, I got curious about that wild scientific glassware traditionally used in the movie laboratories of mad scientists.

As luck would have it, one of the country’s most revered scientific glassblowing shops was nearby, in the quasi-industrial flatlands of West Berkeley. Adams & Chittenden has been “blowing” scientific glass since 1993 and moved to its current location in 1997. And though I had some artsy notions about glassblowing, the first thing I realized when I walked in was: This is not the Renaissance Faire.

I was greeted by Moe Schandelson, the cooperative’s shop manager. He led me through the building’s roll-up gate and into a large interior work area. The muffled roar of a glass lathe in action supplied the ambient sound of a dragon’s lair.

“There are two main glasses that people work with,” Moe explained. “There’s soda lime glass—soft glass—and there’s Pyrex, or borosilicate. Soda lime is the more traditional Venetian glass. They pull it out of big furnaces and shape it using long pipes—the same tools they’ve used for hundreds of years.”

Moe guided me around a workbench to a supply area. Boxes of long glass tubes and pipes filled the shelves. Others held bins of glass valves, flanges, and stopcocks: standard components bought from outside manufacturers. They looked like pieces from a see-through Lego kit.

“This is our stock,” said Moe. “Our raw material starts off as glass tubes and rods. Think of them as our ‘two-by-fours.’ There’s all different sizes.” He pulled one out of a cardboard sleeve. “This is a 110-millimeter diameter tube, with a 3-millimeter wall—and we have tubing much larger and much smaller than that.”

He compares the work to machining and welding “because all kinds of components come together—as opposed to taking a glob of molten glass out of a furnace, and shaping and manipulating it.”

But the craft of scientific glass instruments is not about putting parts together—it’s about problem-solving, and the art of coaxing an extremely hot, fluid medium (around 2000 degrees Fahrenheit) toward precise parameters.

One simple example is a test tube. Let’s say you want to take a piece of glass tubing and shape a round bottom on the end. If you simply melt and close off the bottom of the tube, the glass will be thick. To maintain a consistent wall thickness, you have to heat the glass precisely, pull out just the right amount of material, and form it to its final shape. This “redistribution” is a key part of the scientific glass-blowing process.

I watched this happen at a glass lathe, where glassblower Chris Au was working on what will become a glass tank. He handed me didymium goggles, which filter out the brilliant sodium flares emitted by the hot glass.

The stock glass tubing was mounted in the lathe horizontally and rotated like a rotisserie chicken, enrobed in orange-yellow flame. Chris used various torches to anneal the glass, redistributing the stresses within the walls of the tank-in-progress—visible through a polarization filter as fields of red and blue.

“Without the lathe,” said Moe, “you’d have to turn that tube by hand. And how do you turn something of that size by hand? A glass lathe allows us a lot of control over the operations and is absolutely necessary for large-scale work.”

Before the industrial-size glass lathe, much of this work was done on a bench burner: “the original, old fashioned form of borosilicate glass blowing.” There are a number of these in the shop as well. Bench burners provide another opportunity for heating and shaping glass by hand, often more quickly than using the lathe.

Although the projects in process were fairly straightforward during my visit, other jobs can be extremely complicated. Every glassware object crafted by Adams & Chittenden meets the specific needs of each client—and some of those needs are pretty wild. On the mad scientist spectrum, their portfolio does not disappoint: Past contracts have included a device for measuring the respiration of ants, an apparatus to sample volcanic gases on Hawaii, and a “Hummingbird dinner plate.”

“But the glassware we manufacture is often just part of a larger assembly, which can include heating mantles, stirrers, motors, and sensors. Interestingly, the glassware may be one of the cheapest parts of their assembly. The contents within the glassware might be worth what I get paid per year!”

Company founders Tom Adams and George Chittenden, both now in their 70s and retired, dropped by to provide some history and answer my more esoteric questions.

“I was an art major at San Jose State,” said George, “working with ceramics and glass and thinking, ‘I’m also studying, and trying to play an obscure, double-reed instrument [the zurna]. What am I going to do for a living?’” George had met Tom through the Bay Area folk dance community and knew that Tom was doing this thing called scientific glassblowing. “I called him up and said, ‘What is it?’ I had no idea, no frame of reference. But I looked into it, because it sounded interesting.”

“In what ways is what you do here an art, and in what ways is it a craft?” I asked.

“It’s entirely a craft,” answered Tom. “There’s a lot of things you can do with scientific glass that would be hard to do in any other medium. The art aspect depends on the client and what they are imagining. A whole raft of people are making dope pipes, for example. Some of those are pretty amazing—but we’ve never really been involved in that.”

“At least not as a company,” George amended.

“Around 2018,” said George, “we started getting a lot of that work: people coming in saying they broke their glassware for wiped film evaporators [aka “whiffies”] and were losing $10,000 a day. They would whip out their wallets and say, ‘We want it repaired by tomorrow—how much is that going to take?’ And they paid.”

All told, what did George and Tom love most about the craft of laboratory glassblowing?

“For me,” said Tom, “it was talking to the customers and figuring out what they wanted and what we could make for them. People from every possible business had some need. We made a whole bunch of little tanks for growing corals, with filters in them—so you could have stuff feeding through. It was paid for by BP after the blowout in the Gulf. They were trying to figure out how to restore the corals reefs they destroyed; determining how much benzene and other organic petrochemicals corals could tolerate in the water.”

“After Tom retired,” said George, “I picked up more of the design work, which I liked a lot, and had learned from Tom over the decades. But basic problem-solving in the medium itself was always engaging. How am I going to do that? Because glassblowing itself—moving the material around, understanding how to move it around, without breaking it!—is an unending challenge.”

Especially, I noted, with something like their perplexing Klein bottle (a sort of glass Mobius Strip, but in three dimensions), which is the kind of thing you just might find at a Renaissance Faire.